Pentium and Celeron based on Haswell

Intel has started shipping new Pentium and Celeron processors based on the Haswell microarchitecture rather than the Bay Trail technology it said it was going to use in June.

Haswell provides better performance, while previous Pentium and Celeron chips based on Core architecture have sold well. The Pentium and Celeron chips are stripped-down versions of fourth-generation Core processors, which are used in Ultrabooks and laptops that are more expensive.

Intel is providing a range of chips for laptops at different prices, and the Celeron chips are expected to be used in Chromebooks with Google’s Chrome OS. The company wants to launch Pentium and Celeron chips based on Bay Trail for low-cost desktops and laptops.

While the chips have 2MB of cache, they can’t use the same graphics capabilities as the Core processors because of slower and older Intel integrated graphics processors. The new chips lack multithreading and Turbo Boost but you would expect that.